What to Ask on a Client Intake Form (With Templates)
A first-consultation intake form should collect contact details, the client's goal in their own words, relevant history, the constraints that rule out the obvious plan, and anything you need in order to prepare. Keep it to about ten questions, and send it the moment the booking is confirmed rather than the night before the session.
A first consultation runs for a fixed number of minutes. How much of it is useful work depends almost entirely on what you already knew when it started.
Spend the first ten minutes establishing what the client eats, what they have already tried and what they are actually here for, and you have converted a sixth of a paid hour into data entry. The client is paying consultant rates for it, and answering from memory in front of you, which is the least reliable moment to ask anyone anything.
That is the whole case for an intake form: the first ten minutes of a paid hour, recovered, every time. What follows is the practical version. The eight questions that survive across almost every profession, three complete question sets you can copy for nutrition, astrology and coaching, the field type to use for each question, and when to send the form so it comes back filled in properly.
These are written from what working practitioners actually collect. They are not drawn from any clinical, professional or regulatory intake standard, and they are not a statement of what you are required or permitted to ask. Cut what does not apply to your practice and add what your own work needs.
What Should Every Client Intake Form Ask?
Almost every intake form worth filling in is answering four questions, in this order: where is the client now, what do they want, what makes the obvious answer impossible, and what do you need in order to deliver. If a field does not belong to one of those four, it is usually on the form because you were curious rather than because it changes what you will do.
The order matters more than people expect. Context and goal are easy and get somebody committed. Constraints require thought, so they belong in the middle, once the client is invested. Logistics are dull and belong last, where boredom costs you least.
The eight questions that survive across every profession:
Full name, as you would like me to use it. (Short text)
The best number to reach you on, and whether that number is on WhatsApp. (Short text)
What is the situation right now? (Short text)
What would you like to be different after we have worked together? (Short text)
What have you already tried, and what happened? (Short text)
What is genuinely not negotiable in your routine, your budget or your schedule? (Short text)
Is there a date or a deadline attached to this? (Short text)
Anything you can send ahead: a report, a document, a photograph, a brief. (File attachment)
The field type in brackets is the part almost nobody writes down, and it decides whether the answers are still usable six months later. A weight typed into a text box is a sentence. A weight typed into a number field is something you can put beside the next one. Setav's form builder offers four types, which is roughly the set worth using anywhere: short text, number, multi-select and file attachment.
How Many Questions Is Too Many?
There is no published research on how long a professional intake form should be. The nearest reliable measurement comes from a different problem entirely. Baymard Institute's benchmarking of e-commerce checkouts found that the average checkout in 2024 used 11.3 form fields, down from 11.8 in 2021 and 12.7 in 2019, and concluded that most sites need only about 8.
Treat that as an analogy rather than a measurement. An intake form is not a checkout: your client has already booked and usually already paid, so motivation is higher and the drop-off is shallower. But the direction of the effect is not in dispute, and a twenty-eight question intake form does get abandoned, or worse, completed carelessly.
Careless completion is the real risk, and it is worse than abandonment. An abandoned form tells you something. A form where the client typed "n/a" into the last eleven boxes tells you nothing at all, while looking exactly like it told you something.
Field-count figures read from Baymard Institute's own publication (Checkout Form Fields, baymard.com) on 21 August 2026. That is e-commerce checkout research, not intake research. Transferring it to professional intake forms is our inference and is stated as one, not as a measured result.
What Not to Ask
Anything you will not act on. If the answer does not change what you do in the session or afterwards, it is curiosity, not intake.
Anything you already have. Do not ask for the email address the client booked with.
Anything that is really three questions in a coat. "Tell me about your background and what you are hoping to achieve" is a box people stare at and then write one line into. Split it.
Aadhaar, PAN or any other government identity document. You do not need it to run a consultation, and holding copies of one creates a storage and liability problem that is entirely avoidable. If your work genuinely requires an identity check, do it separately, at the point where it is actually required, and tell the client why.
Nutritionist Intake Form: The Questions That Matter
A nutrition intake is mostly reconstruction. You are trying to see a week of somebody's eating from the outside, while they are trying to describe it from memory. Structure does most of the work here: separate fields for the things that are numbers, option lists for the things that are categories, and one attachment slot so the blood work arrives as a file rather than as four screenshots in a chat thread.
| Question | Field type | Why you need it |
|---|---|---|
| What does a normal weekday of eating look like? Rough timings are fine. | Short text | The baseline. Ask for timings rather than calories: meal spacing explains more at a first session than portion size does. |
| What is different at the weekend? | Short text | Most plans fail on a Saturday. You cannot design around a weekend you have never seen. |
| Who cooks, and who else eats the same food? | Short text | Decides whether you are advising one person or quietly negotiating with a household. |
| Height, and weight today. | Number (two fields) | Two number fields, not one text box. Figures you can compare in three months only exist if they arrived as figures. |
| Diagnosed conditions, medications and supplements. | Short text | Safety, and it changes what you can suggest. Far better answered at home with the boxes in hand than from memory on a call. |
| Foods you do not eat, for any reason. | Multi-select | Offer the common ones as options (vegetarian, no eggs, no onion or garlic, Jain, no beef or pork, no dairy) and leave one short text box for the rest. Faster to fill, and far cleaner to read back. |
| Allergies or intolerances. | Short text | Keep this separate from preferences. Merging the two is how a preference ends up treated as clinical and an allergy ends up treated as a preference. |
| What would you like to be different in three months? | Short text | In their words, not yours. Somebody who writes "lose 8kg before my sister's wedding in November" is a different client from somebody who writes "be healthier", and you want to know which one is walking in. |
| What have you tried before, and what do you think went wrong? | Short text | The highest-value question on the form. It tells you what not to prescribe, which is usually more useful than knowing what to. |
| How many days a week do you eat food you did not prepare? | Number | One number that predicts more about adherence than most of the diet history above it. |
| Recent blood work or a health check-up report. | File attachment | Arrives as a document you can open on the call, instead of four screenshots you have to pinch and zoom through while the client waits. |
That is eleven. If you want ten, drop the weekend question and ask it in the session, because the answer usually needs a follow-up anyway.
Astrologer Intake Form: Collecting Birth Details Correctly
Birth data is the single strongest argument for a form in any profession, because it is the one case where an answer collected badly is not merely slower to get. It is wrong.
Collected in a chat window, a birth time arrives as "around 4 I think, my mother says maybe 4:30", three messages apart, on a Tuesday, and you end up re-asking it at the start of the session anyway. Collected on a form with separate fields and an explicit question about certainty, it arrives once, in a shape you can actually work from.
The field most birth-details forms miss is not a detail. It is the question of how sure the client is about the time.
"Around 4pm" recorded as "around 4pm" is more useful than "around 4pm" recorded as 16:00, because the second version hides the uncertainty from your future self. Give the client an option list and they will tell you honestly. Give them a bare time field and they will guess, and the guess will look like a fact forever after.
| Question | Field type | Why you need it |
|---|---|---|
| Date of birth. | Short text | Its own field. A date buried inside a sentence has to be re-read every single time you open the record. |
| Exact time of birth, as precisely as you know it. | Short text | The field the entire chart turns on. Ask for it separately so it cannot be lost inside another answer. |
| How sure are you of that time? | Multi-select | Certain, from a document. To the nearest half hour. A rough family memory. Not known at all. One option list, and the rectification conversation no longer starts blind. |
| Place of birth: city and state. | Short text | You need coordinates and the client does not have them. City and state is the version they can actually answer. |
| Where do you live now, if it is different? | Short text | Relevant to the reading, and it also tells you which time zone the call is in. |
| What is the one question you want this session to answer? | Short text | Forces a focus. A reading asked to cover everything ends up covering nothing in particular. |
| Is there a decision or a date you are working towards? | Short text | Turns a general reading into a timed one, which is very often what the client actually wanted. |
| Have you had a reading before, and what were you told? | Short text | Tells you what you are being compared against, and what the client is quietly hoping you will contradict. |
| Is there anything you would rather I did not discuss? | Short text | Costs one line to ask, and it prevents the worst moment a reading can have. |
| Preferred language for the session. | Multi-select | Worth asking anywhere in India, and it costs the client a single tap. |
| A birth certificate, hospital record or an existing chart, if you have one. | File attachment | Settles the birth-time question in one upload instead of three rounds of messages. |
Coach and Consultant Intake Form: Scoping the Engagement
A coaching or consulting intake is doing a different job from the two above. You are not gathering history so much as scoping: working out whether the engagement the client has in mind is the one you can actually deliver, before either of you has committed to it.
The two questions that do most of the work are the two people find awkward to ask out loud: who else is involved in the decision, and what the budget is. On a form they are just fields. In the session they cost you five minutes and some of the room's goodwill.
| Question | Field type | Why you need it |
|---|---|---|
| What does your business or your role actually do, in one or two sentences? | Short text | Written by them, not read off their website. What they choose to say first is diagnostic. |
| What made you look for help now, rather than six months ago? | Short text | The trigger. It is usually the real brief, and it is almost never in the enquiry message. |
| Who else is involved in deciding this? | Short text | Tells you whether you are talking to the buyer. On a form it reads as admin. In the room it reads as a challenge. |
| If this goes well, what is different in ninety days? | Short text | Their definition of success, with a date on it. Undated success is a wish. |
| How would you know it worked? What would you measure? | Short text | Separates the clients who have a number in mind from the ones who have a feeling. Both are workable, but not in the same way. |
| What have you already tried? | Short text | Stops you from proposing, with enthusiasm, the thing that failed here last year. |
| Roughly what budget range is this sitting in? | Multi-select | Give bands, not an empty box. People will tick a band they would never type a number into. |
| Is that budget approved, or notional? | Multi-select | Approved. Notional. I am the person who approves it. One tap, and it changes the entire shape of the call. |
| Is there a deadline, and what is driving it? | Short text | A deadline with a cause behind it is real. A deadline without one moves. |
| How many people does this affect? | Number | Scope, as a figure. Ten and ten thousand are very different engagements with identical descriptions. |
| Anything you can send ahead: a deck, a set of numbers, a brief. | File attachment | The difference between reading it before the call and being read to during it. |
For a paid discovery call, cut this to the first four and the budget band. The long version belongs on the form for a programme or a retainer, where the answers are worth the client's ten minutes.
When Should You Send the Intake Form?
As soon as the booking is confirmed. Not the night before.
The moment somebody books is the moment they are most invested in the thing they have just booked. That is the window. Every hour after it, the form competes with the rest of their week, and by the evening before the session it is competing with the session itself, which is precisely when you get the one-line answers.
A form you have to remember to send is a form that gets sent for two weeks.
In Setav you set this up once instead of once per booking. You build and send intake forms from the app, then attach a form to the service, so the client fills in what you need before the appointment. Configure it once per service rather than sending a link after every booking.
Open Forms and either start from scratch or duplicate a sample. Nutritionist Intake Form, Daily tracker and Ask me anything ship as samples, and cutting a sample down is a faster first draft than most people write from blank.
Add the fields: short text for written answers, number for anything you will want to compare later, multi-select for the categories, and one file attachment for the document.
Attach the form to the service, so the client fills it in before the appointment rather than after a chasing message from you.
Read what comes back in the Form Responses inbox, one chronological feed across every form you have built.
For ongoing clients, link a form to a task, set that task to recur, and assign it from the client's shared space. The check-in then repeats without you re-sending anything.
Where the answers land is the part most setups get wrong, and it has nothing to do with the questions. The usual arrangement is a Google Form sent over WhatsApp once the booking is confirmed. Responses do arrive, in a spreadsheet, sorted by submission time, identified by whatever the client typed into the name box. Three months later, when you want to know what this client said at intake, you are searching that spreadsheet by half-remembered name while they wait on the call. And because it is one more tab, on a busy Thursday you skip it and wing the first five minutes, which returns you to the problem the form was meant to solve, except that now you also maintain a form.
The test for any intake setup is one question. When you open a client's record, is their intake answer already there?
If the answer is no, you have not built an intake process. You have built a survey. On Setav, submissions land in the Form Responses inbox and the same submission also sits inside that client's shared space, next to their bookings, tasks and files, so you can keep every client's answers in one place instead of in a spreadsheet sorted by date.
The timing principle here is the one that governs the step before it too. We wrote about the gap between interested and booked separately, and it has the same shape: intent decays fast, so the ask has to land while it is still high.
How Do You Get Clients to Actually Fill It In?
Start from the assumption that nobody wants to. Every decision below follows from that.
Six things that help:
Keep it near ten questions. Every field you add is a field the last three now compete with.
Say why, in one line at the top. "These five minutes save us the first ten of your session" beats "please complete the form below", and it has the advantage of being true.
Attach the deadline to the session, not to a date. "Before we meet on Thursday" is a deadline people act on. "Within 7 days" is not.
Put it where the client already is. In India that means WhatsApp, not email. A form buried in an inbox somebody checks on Sundays is a form you will be chasing on Wednesday.
Make the last question optional, and say so. People finish forms whose end they can see.
Chase once, personally, then stop. One short message the day before works. A third reminder teaches the client that your messages can be ignored.
Use Real Labels, Not Placeholder Text
This one is a research finding rather than an opinion, and it is the cheapest improvement available to anybody building a form. Nielsen Norman Group's work on placeholder text is unambiguous. Text that sits inside the box and disappears when the user starts typing strains short-term memory, stops people checking their answers before they submit, and makes error recovery require deleting what you typed just to re-read the question. Their eyetracking work adds a further problem: users' eyes are drawn to empty fields, so a field that already looks filled is the one most likely to be skipped entirely. The recommendation is to put clear labels outside the box and keep them visible.
Placeholder findings from Nielsen Norman Group, "Placeholders in Form Fields Are Harmful" by Katie Sherwin, published 11 May 2014 and last reviewed 10 September 2018. Read at nngroup.com on 21 August 2026.
One Form Per Service, Not One Form for Everyone
A single intake form covering every service you offer is how forms get long. A thirty-minute discovery call does not need the eleven questions a three-month programme needs, and asking them anyway is how you lose the discovery call. Build a short one and a long one, attach each to the service it belongs to, and the length problem mostly solves itself.
Ask once, before the session, in a form that files itself next to the client it came from.
Frequently Asked Questions
Contact details, the client's goal in their own words, the current situation, what they have already tried, the constraints that rule out the obvious plan, any deadline they are working to, and one attachment slot for a document you need before the session. That is eight fields and it covers most professions. Add the four or five that are specific to your work, then stop.
As soon as the booking is confirmed, while the client is still invested in the thing they just booked. The night before the session is too late, and that is when you get one-line answers. The reliable version is to attach the form to the service rather than sending a link by hand after every booking, so it is part of the booking instead of something you have to remember.
A normal weekday of eating with rough timings, what changes at the weekend, who cooks and who else eats the same food, height and weight as number fields, diagnosed conditions and medications, foods the client does not eat, allergies kept separate from preferences, what they want to be different in three months, what they have tried before and what went wrong, and one attachment for recent blood work. That is eleven questions and you can run it at eight.
Date of birth, exact time of birth and place of birth, as three separate fields rather than one sentence, plus a fourth field asking how certain the client is about the time. Certainty is the field most forms miss and the one that decides whether you are working from a chart or from a guess. Add the specific question the client wants answered, their current city, and their preferred language for the session.
Around ten questions. There is no published research on professional intake length. The nearest reliable measurement comes from a different problem: Baymard Institute's checkout benchmarking put the 2024 average at 11.3 form fields and concluded that most sites need only about 8. That is checkout research and applying it to intake is an inference, not a measurement, but the direction is not in dispute. The bigger risk is not abandonment, it is careless completion. A client who types n/a into the last eleven boxes has told you nothing while appearing to tell you something.
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